Privatized wars, public waste

Our opinion: How many reports of widespread waste in defense spending will it take for Congress and the Presidents to see that billions of dollars are just waiting to be saved.

To put the report by the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan into some kind of manageable perspective, consider the waste of a government throwing out $12.5 million a day, every day, for 10 years.

That money could buy 80 fully armored Humvees a day to replace the thin-skinned ones blamed for so many deaths. It could provide food stamps to 3 million people, pay the average unemployment benefits for more than a quarter-million individuals, fully fund the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the better part of two years or pay half the Environmental Protection Agency’s annual cost.

While it acknowledged there are some benefits to using private contractors, the commission estimates that the over-reliance on them and inadequate oversight has squandered between $31 billion and $60 billion. The contracting tab for the two wars is projected to total $206 billion by the year’s end.

It’s all the more frustrating to know that such waste is hardly new. Critics, congressmen and presidential candidates have been tut-tutting about it since we heard about the Pentagon’s $640 toilet seats and $7,600 coffee makers in the mid-1980s. Just eight years ago, the Government Accountability Office found that the Pentagon couldn’t account for $1 trillion in spending; the Army alone had lost track of dozens of airplanes and tanks.

Joining the military this time are the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development, which rely on contractors even more heavily.

When you get past all the zeros, one finding stands out: Budget cuts have left the government unable to keep track of all the private contractors it uses. Contractors are even hired to oversee contractors.

Ah, but at least this puts Americans to work, right? Wrong. Of the nearly 263,000 contractors, fewer than 46,000 have been U.S. nationals. There is little competition as well, the commission found.

As a result of all this, largely unaccountable civilians and firms, many of them foreign, are doing sensitive work that might be more appropriate for government employees. It’s dangerous work, too: 2,429 contractors have died in the two wars, compared with 6,131 military fatalities as of July. Between June 2009 and this past March, there were more deaths among contractors than the military.

And the waste isn’t over. Tens of billions more stand to be lost if Iraq and Afghanistan abandon the projects and programs that all this money created, from the Afghan National Security Forces to scores of health care centers in Iraq that are beyond the county’s ability to maintain.

What’s the answer? In the commission’s view, it includes greater resources to oversee contractors; more coordination across federal agencies; assessing the risks of using contractors before they’re hired; better understanding the needs, capabilities and goals of the host countries; reining in the use of contractors particularly for security of bases and convoys; more competition; and more enforcement, including suspending or barring firms that don’t perform up to par, exploit people, or cheat the system.

Much as we’d hope otherwise, these aren’t the last wars America will fight, and contractors, it seems, are here to say. A Congress that’s truly committed to less costly government could start right here, making sure the report’s recommendations are heeded.

As the commission itself warned: Delay and denial are not good options.

To read the commission’s full report, go to The Observation Deck blog at http: